Escultura d’Afrodita de la Casa Museu de José Benlliure (València)

Laburpena

Among the antiques that the painter José Benlliure brought from Italy and is currently kept in his Valencian studio, there is a small marble sculpture representing the goddess Aphrodite. Its recent restoration has revealed that it was a composition made up of two parts belonging to different pieces that had been joined with plaster. The sculptural type represented is that of semi-dressed Aphrodite, in which the goddess appears with a naked torso and a mantle that slides from the hips to the feet. However, restoration work has revealed that only the lower half corresponds with certainty to this type and can be dated to the 2nd century AD, while the upper part could have belonged to some other sculptural type that is difficult to identify due to the fragmentary state of the piece and can only be roughly dated to the 1st-2nd centuries AD.